An Education Befitting a Fourteenth Century Gentleman

Told that a student has attended an expensive private school--let us make it an expensive private school in continental Europe--and there had a curriculum that included Latin, fencing and horse-riding different people react in different ways.

The person of conventional mind will be awed by the combination of upper classness with unfamiliarity (Latin, fencing, riding remote from their daily life), and, believing the rich superior and their educations superior and being impressed by anything associated with other, will feel themselves inferior.

By contrast the person of really practical mind will not be awed, but rather dubious about the training a person of the twenty-first century for the demands of the fourteenth century, when Latin, the sword, horsemanship, were genuinely important to the career of a man of gentle birth. They might take an ironic attitude toward it, but alternatively they might be anxious at the implications for the larger world--which will have an elite whose incapacities to fulfill its tasks will thus include a thoroughly out of date preparation for life. (Thus did George Orwell speak of politicians who could quote Horace but had never heard of algebra.)

Those inclined to the left's view of where the wealth for such educations come from could be expected to react more strongly still. That the great wealth underwriting these educational absurdities is not a "meritocratic" reward for "hard work" and talent but the proceeds of "primitive accumulation," "surplus labor," and "financial parasitism," makes such usage of their money all the more grotesque--while seeming to them yet another discredit of the elite the conventional so respect.

Persons who think that way should be unintimidated by the presumed superiority of those with elite educations, the poses they strike, and the Oohs and Ahhs of the credulous at the thought that here is someone who was taught to handle a foil in school. Still, open contempt is a rarity, with few displaying it quite like an Upton Sinclair as he lamented that Woodrow Wilson, from whom so many expected so much in the years of the First World War and after, had been studying ancient languages and "imbecile" theology instead of getting the training--in economics, in sociology, in geography--to grapple with the real problems of that moment, with consequences that Sinclair was far from alone in deeming disastrous for the world.